Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Who Are Virginia Woolf's Female Contemporaries?
- Virginia Woolf's Cultural Contexts
- Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries Abroad
- Reconfiguring the Mermaid: HD, Virginia Woolf, and the Radical Ethics of Writing as Marine Practice
- A Carnival of the Grotesque: Feminine Imperial Flânerie in Virginia Woolf 's “Street Haunting” and Una Marson's “Little Brown Girl”
- Mad Women: Dance, Female Sexuality, and Surveillance in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman
- Shop My Closet: Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, and Fashion Contemporaries
- Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective
- Making Waves in Lonely Parallel: Evelyn Scott and Virginia Woolf
- Critical Characters in Search of an Author: Cornelia Sorabji and Virginia Woolf
- “In my mind I saw my mother”: Virginia Woolf, Zitkala-Ša, and Autobiography
- Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries at Home
- Tribute to Jane Marcus
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program 223
Reconfiguring the Mermaid: HD, Virginia Woolf, and the Radical Ethics of Writing as Marine Practice
from Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries Abroad
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Who Are Virginia Woolf's Female Contemporaries?
- Virginia Woolf's Cultural Contexts
- Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries Abroad
- Reconfiguring the Mermaid: HD, Virginia Woolf, and the Radical Ethics of Writing as Marine Practice
- A Carnival of the Grotesque: Feminine Imperial Flânerie in Virginia Woolf 's “Street Haunting” and Una Marson's “Little Brown Girl”
- Mad Women: Dance, Female Sexuality, and Surveillance in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman
- Shop My Closet: Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, and Fashion Contemporaries
- Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective
- Making Waves in Lonely Parallel: Evelyn Scott and Virginia Woolf
- Critical Characters in Search of an Author: Cornelia Sorabji and Virginia Woolf
- “In my mind I saw my mother”: Virginia Woolf, Zitkala-Ša, and Autobiography
- Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries at Home
- Tribute to Jane Marcus
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program 223
Summary
Among modernist women writers, none are more distinctively associated with the sea than H.D. and Virginia Woolf. Both writers keenly draw upon the Western philosophical-literary tradition of thalassic metaphors—in which these tropes are often used to perpetuate a number of dominant discourses (Muscogiuri 102)—reappropriating and shrewdly reworking them so as to challenge those discourses in ways that are remarkably comparable and complementary, configuring a shared dimension that is simultaneously aesthetic and political. Hence, reading their respective handling of these pivotal metaphors together can better elucidate fundamental aspects of their feminist politics and poetics. In particular, this paper will highlight their approach to language and writing in connection with gender politics, notions of identity, subalternity, and aesthetics by engaging with one specific element of thalassic metaphors which, albeit significant in their formation and politics, has been so far overlooked in studies of either writer: the ancient mythological configuration of woman as siren and mermaid.
Since its first literary appearance in The Odyssey, the myth of the Sirens has been questioned, rewritten, and reconfigured in disparate ways. Yet, remarkably, the implications of the Homeric episode—in terms of knowledge, language, poiesis, and their interconnections— are seldom considered in theoretical discourse (Adorno and Horkheimer being a notable exception). Furthermore, the interrelated gender politics underpinning this masculinist construction of a female myth—noted by De Beauvoir in The Second Sex—are entirely disregarded by male theorists and rarely discussed by women, except in recent works in iconography, mythography, and classical studies, pioneered by Jane Ellen Harrison. However, these works generally ignore the question of the cognition of the Sirens (linked by some with the tree of knowledge) and the crucial fact that, with this episode in The Odyssey, “a change is effected in the historical situation of language” (Adorno and Horkheimer 60). Indeed, as representatives of a predominantly female oral tradition, and as human/animal/divine hybrid beings, the Sirens unified intellect and the senses, thought and experience, in their enrapturing song.
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- Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries , pp. 94 - 101Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016