The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group

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The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group Maine State Library Digital Maine Academic Research and Dissertations Maine State Library Special Collections 2019 In the Mouth of the Woolf: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group Christina A. Barber IDSVA Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalmaine.com/academic Recommended Citation Barber, Christina A., "In the Mouth of the Woolf: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group" (2019). Academic Research and Dissertations. 29. https://digitalmaine.com/academic/29 This Text is brought to you for free and open access by the Maine State Library Special Collections at Digital Maine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Academic Research and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Maine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOOLF: THE POSTHUMANISTIC THEATER OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP Christina Anne Barber Submitted to the faculty of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy August, 2019 ii Accepted by the faculty at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. COMMITTEE MEMBERS Committee Chair: Simonetta Moro, PhD Director of School & Vice President for Academic Affairs Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts Committee Member: George Smith, PhD Founder & President Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts Committee Member: Conny Bogaard, PhD Executive Director Western Kansas Community Foundation iii © 2019 Christina Anne Barber ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv Mother of Romans, joy of gods and men, Venus, life-giver, who under planet and star visits the ship-clad sea, the grain-clothed land always, for through you all that’s born and breathes is gotten, created, brought forth to see the sun, Lady, the storms and clouds of heaven shun you, You and your advent; Earth, sweet magic-maker, sends up her flowers for you, broad Ocean smiles, and peace glows in the light that fills the sky. — Lucretius — For my mother, Faith, who taught me to love with courage, and to forgive. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Eight years ago in New York City, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Simonetta Moro as her teaching assistant in a curatorial course. I was completing MFA at the time, and I admired her thinking on art theory and aesthetics. Her coursework and lectures were challenging and rewarding, and she extended her classroom into the galleries and museums of New York. I loved the class; it was the highlight of my thesis year. Over coffee one afternoon, Simonetta told me about pursuing her PhD; hers was an incredible journey, and it sparked my curiosity. I left the conversation inspired to pursue a doctorate, and hoped to someday have her as my advisor. Today, I have the distinct honor of thanking Dr. Moro for her mentorship and for inspiring me to pursue a PhD. Simonetta, I will always be grateful for your sound tutelage, generous advice, and clear thinking; these were the stars I navigated by when I had lost my map and compass. Thank you for helping me to realize myself as a scholar. I thank Dr. George Smith for urging me to ask the hard questions, and for insisting that I have courage in my ideas and writing. Your seminars kept me in alarm, in delight, and awe. Your academic rigor and ethos of care lit the way to new thinking and a new becoming in my life. Thanks to Amy Curtis, your warmth and kindness have always made me feel welcome at IDSVA. I am also grateful to my esteemed committee members, for your time and support in making this dissertation a success. To every female artist-philosopher who came before me, thank you. To my beloved Susanna Mishler, thank you for encouraging my ideas and dreams. Thank you for your steadfast and tireless edits, for your trusted readership, for enduring my nomadic writing habits, and for patiently navigating my stacks of books and papers. Our conversations about poetry and philosophy have nourished this project. I am also grateful to Susanna’s parents, Dr. Barbara Mishler and Dr. Craig Mishler, for their support. To my parents, Faith Varga and Charles Kennedy: thank you for believing in and loving me. To my siblings and their fabulous spouses: Michael Barber and Megan McBride, Ilona Barber and Steve Leider, Erik Barber and Alicia Besh, Victoria Barber and Kerry Tasker, Peter Barber and Jenny Evans, thank you for cheering me on. To my much-loved nephews and nieces: Isaac, Bea, Ian, Anya, Zoltan, and Owen; each of you inspire me to make my best work. To my father, Richard Barber: thanks for your support. To Alivia DeBusk, Veldee Hall, Liza Root and Amber Frizzell: your friendship kept me connected and happy. To Carlyn Larsen: thank you for your guidance and compassion. To my devoted, furry companion, Apollo: thank you for our walks and your unflagging interest in everything. To my IDSVA study group, Mike Adams, Wilson Hurst, Taliesin Thomas, and my dear friend Dr. Louise Carrie Wales: thank you for all the laughs, cries, and interesting conversations. I am grateful to IDSVA’s librarian, Laura Graveline for her knowledgeable help. Special thanks to: Dr. David Driskell, Dr. Christopher Yates, Dr. Howard Caygill, Dr. Michael Smith, Dr. Paul Armstong, and Dr. Egar Coons, and Cohorts ’13 and ’14 for enriching my academic experience at IDSVA. vi ABSTRACT Christina Anne Barber IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOOLF: THE POSTHUMANISTIC THEATER OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP Literary critics and art theorists celebrate the work of Virginia Woolf and the activities of London’s Bloomsbury Group as emblematic of the early achievements made in modernist art and aesthetics. This dissertation argues that their creative activities exceeded modernist ideologies and practices of unity, purity, and autonomy; they instead embody the distinct postmodernist traits of hybridity, discord, and fragmentation. This project relocates Woolf’s literary work and the culture of the Bloomsbury Group within a posthumanistic theater; modernism was a performative cloak for their radical personal beliefs and endeavors. In their private lives, the Bloomsberries’ feminism, queer subculture, atheism, pacifism, and mixing of social classes reveal them – as individuals and as an intimate group – to be highly performative, heterogeneous, and post-human. I assert that Woolf’s novels describe the Bloomsberries’ radical social values and behaviors via the genre of fiction. The genre safeguarded the novels’ contents for public consumption on the premise that fiction is not confined to facts and real people or events. Woolf’s stories offered unutterable truths about herself, the group, and quotidian urban life. This postmodern re-reading of Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and her essay, A Room of One’s Own, repositions Woolf’s lyric prose as contributing to discourse on the post-human condition and with contemporary feminist and queer theory. Yoking the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Haraway, Braidotti, Bryant, Bergson, vii and others, I assert that Woolf’s stories occupy a threshold between fiction and post-human philosophy, because her characters exceed being in the world and instead participate in a scheme of becoming-with the world. Woolf’s scheme for intersubjective consciousness is a rhizomatic relation of encounters, machines, and multispecies alliances that permeate the post-human body and psyche. We find, in her century-old artistic vision, a schema for today’s post-human storytelling in the Anthropocene. Keywords: Post-human, Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury Group, Postmodern, Intersubjectivity viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………v Abstract.....................................................................................................................vi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Intersubjectivity and Identity as Performance……………………..24 1.1: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group………………………..24 1.2 The Waves as a Keyhole to The Bloomsberries………………………………...46 Chapter 2: Assemblages of the Post-human in The Waves……………………...78 2.1: Silence, Soliloquy, and Percival, Woolf’s Polyphonic Hero…………………..87 2.2: Rhizomatic Assemblages and Character Hybrids in The Waves……………...103 Chapter 3: For There She Was ………………………………………………….133 3.1: Duration and Intersections of Being in Daily Life……………………………133 3.2: Love and Lyric Meditations in Mrs. Dalloway………………………………..142 3.3: Flights of Madness and Disorientation in London…………………………….156 Chapter 4: Woolf Tracks and Feminist Theory...................................................174 4.1: Disparities in Time: Lines of Flight, and a Becoming-Woman Philosophy…..181 4.2: Intersubjective Portraiture of a Fragmented Ego………………………….......198 4.3: Becoming Woman-Manly & Becoming Man-Womanly: A Postmodern Rereading of Orlando, To The Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own………216 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………....235 Future Work in the Anthropocene…………………...…………………..........241 Endnotes ………………………………………………………………….…….…257 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….…264 Appendix A: Abbreviations For In-Text Citations…………………………….…..274 1 INTRODUCTION Literary critics and art theorists observe the work of Virginia Woolf and the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, a controversial assemblage of artists and intellectuals in London during the early twentieth century, as representative of early modernist art and aesthetics (Connor 290). This dissertation asserts that their creative activities exceeded
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