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Virginia Woolf's Materteral Form Reynolds, R WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Aunthood and Narrative Voice: Virginia Woolf’s Materteral Form Reynolds, R. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Ms Rosemary Reynolds, 2020. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Aunthood and Narrative Voice: Virginia Woolf’s Materteral Form Rosemary Jean Reynolds Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature School of Humanities, University of Westminster April 2020 1 ABSTRACT It is rare to find an area of Virginia Woolf’s work that has not had, in some form, critical attention. Yet this thesis is the first study, of any length, which takes aunts in Woolf’s writing as its focus. This thesis starts by asking the question, why are there so many aunts in Woolf’s writing? This initial enquiry leads to a consideration of the position of aunthood in British culture during Woolf’s lifetime, and argues that the discourse surrounding the 1907 Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act is emblematic of the aunt’s unique position between inside, and outside, the family. Using this historicist research alongside existing poststructuralist Woolf scholarship, this thesis develops a new way to read Woolf’s innovation in narrative form. It develops a theory of the materteral which takes into account the aunt’s specific historical position at the time, and Woolf’s personal conception of aunthood as expressed in her private writing as well as her fiction. Using this understanding of the materteral this thesis traces the trajectory of aunthood in Woolf’s work, whether it manifests in character (Helen Ambrose, Eleanor Pargiter, and Lucy Swithin to name a few of Woolf’s aunts) or, as this work argues is particularly pertinent for Woolf studies, in narrative voice. 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER ONE: Mother and Other: positioning the aunt in the history of the family .......... 17 CHAPTER TWO: ‘Have you any aunts?’: aunthood and subversion of the Bildungsroman in The Voyage Out........................................................................................................................ 52 CHAPTER THREE: ‘She was born to the knowledge’: Aunts, Narration, and Materteral Form from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room .......................................................................... 108 CHAPTER FOUR: ‘Where does she begin, and where do I end?’: Unfixing boundaries in The Years and Between the Acts ............................................................................................ 168 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 232 3 In loving memory of my brother Freddie Reynolds 1990-2015 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I am sincerely grateful to my supervisors: Professor Leigh Wilson and Dr. Simon Avery. Your kindness and humour, alongside your thorough and generous feedback on my work, have made writing this thesis a truly happy experience. Thank you for your guidance, endlessly-impressive knowledge and expertise, and your belief in me and this project. There are other academics without whom this project would not exist – Professor Steve Ellis and Dr. Jan Campbell were crucial to the early stage of its development at the University of Birmingham, bringing respectively an expertise in Woolf’s relationship to her past, and in psychoanalytic theory. Dr. Helen Glew at University of Westminster – your insight and support is so much appreciated. Dr. Matthew Geary, thank you for your help navigating psychoanalytic theory and for your many years of friendship. To all my students at University of Westminster, at HMYOI Feltham, and to all of my young people at SPEAR London, thank you. You keep me curious, alert, and alive – always helping me to situate my work in a bigger picture. To my understanding managers who have allowed me to multi-task as much as I have over the last few years, thank you – Kim Hastilow at University of Westminster, and Avis Maxwell at SPEAR London. Sincere thanks to my proof-readers (and friends) – Jenny and Sue Fogarty, Dr. Anne Reus, Cassie Edmiston, and Dr. Mark Vincent. Thank you to my partner, David McNamee, for your love, patience, and cups of tea. Thank you to Kitty Clark, for your unwavering faith in me over the last 16 years and for inspiring me to be boldly creative in all that I do. Thank you to Dr. Morwenna Bennallick for offering me support in every area of my life, and for showing me how to fight the good fight. 5 Thank you to my family for their support: my dad Alan Reynolds, his partner Sue Edmunds, my mum Helen Reynolds, and my brothers Freddie and Matthew. Thank you also to my mother-in-law (or rather, not-in-law) Sally McNamee, for all your encouragement. Thank you to my Saturday morning social club: Frances O’Callaghan, Ros Selby and Val Townsend. Long may we read our fortunes together. And finally to my dear friends Kirsty Bryant, Lauren Puckey, Marney Ryan, Christina Brown, Chelsey Mordue, Katy Oglethorpe, Susie Ivins, and Maggie, Katie, and Emma Cruise; thank you for filling my life with so much laughter and for always picking me up when I fall. 6 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. Rosie Reynolds, 21/04/20 7 INTRODUCTION This thesis takes for its subject the role of the aunt in Virginia Woolf’s experiment with narrative position and voice. While some critics (such as Elizabeth French Boyd and Jane Marcus) have considered Woolf’s own aunts, and the relationship between their writing and hers, this thesis is the first study of aunthood in Virginia Woolf’s fiction.1 It seeks to understand why there are so many aunts in her work, and to question their roles as actors on the level of diegesis and on the extradiegetic level of narrative voice. In this thesis I conduct close literary analysis of Woolf’s work, but the lack of any existing framework for literary analysis of aunthood has led me to also utilise research from other disciplines and to take an approach that also uses elements of narratology, kinship studies and historical investigation. Thus while my research draws on the great body of Woolf criticism that exists, it also seeks to identify an area of Woolf studies that is deserving of more attention. Aunthood was a subject which Woolf could not put down. From Helen Ambrose in her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) to Lucy Swithin in her final novel Between the Acts (1941), Woolf’s novels and stories are full of aunts. In this thesis I argue that by reading these aunts closely as aunts, rather than following the critical tendency to read them as surrogate mothers (if their familial position is noticed at all), we can find a new way of understanding Woolf’s innovation in narrative form and the relationship between character and narrative in her work. In this thesis I work towards a theory of materteral narrative voice as one that exists between character and narration. This narrative voice is both a presence in the text and in its 1 For example, Elizabeth French Boyd, Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976); and Jane Marcus, ‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination’, in Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 8 containing narrative. It resists distinction, fixedness, even naming - and therefore, in terms as defined by Julia Kristeva, resisting the patriarchal symbolic.2 The materteral narrative voice challenges patriarchal notions of separation and delineation and reconfigures the relationship between textual diegetic levels – between the story and the telling of the story. In this way it is associated with the semiotic – with that pre-linguistic space before even the most primal boundary between 'self' and ‘other' exists. To understand why it is the figure of the aunt that is key to Woolf’s narrative innovation, it is necessary to historicise the family romance that underpins Kristevan readings of Woolf – to bring together poststructuralist approaches with social history. In Freudian terms, separation from the mother (the transition from the semiotic world of the mother to the symbolic order of the father) is a necessary part of a childhood, as is the Oedipal phase which allows us to detach from our parents and become healthy adults and part of a social world beyond the family. These separations, first from the mother and then from the parental unit, are facilitated by the incest taboo: to act on our sexual desire we (and I acknowledge here the cultural specifics of Freud’s ‘we’) must leave the family and direct our desire elsewhere. Claire Colebrook, in her work on feminist criticism and poststructuralism, explains the narrative in the structuralist terms with which post- structuralism was in dialogue: The entry into this system [of culture] takes the form of a prohibition of incest: we abandon the first object of desire – the mother who meets all our bodily needs – and establish relations of alliance with other families, whose women we exchange for those of our own. Culture begins, then, with the exchange of women. Woman 2 Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, in The Kristeva Reader, Ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89–136. 9 becomes that first desired and denied object that is renounced in order that we might recognise each other as cultural subjects.34 But the aunt, who I argue is neither fully inside nor outside of the family, complicates this exchange. Who does she belong to? Aunthood problematises the incest taboo, as I demonstrate below by situating the figure of the aunt within a legal and sociohistorical framework.
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